Balance is always a difficult thing to achieve. Whilst the digerati sometimes look down their noses at the masses, much like bankers once did in financial times of yore, they are likely to be as much one side of 'the balance' as the others. Yes, they might still be languishing on IE6 using Favorites rather than Firefox 3 and Delicious, but are they happy?
Here's one songster's take:
Andrew Smith tickled my fractal with his post yesterday "Where are the PR Numerati?" (and here on MarCom Professional). Why? Because he's right and I'm numerate and I'm in PR. His post was prompted by the August 2008 book "The Numerati" by senior Business Week writer Stephen Baker.
Public relations had been boiled down to a very simple process by the end of the 1990s. Journalists write the papers and magazines the public reads. The PRs know the journalists. The clients retain the PR professionals.
That simple world is no more. I don't mean that traditional media relations no longer exists, only that it is now just a sub-set of a far more complex map of exerting influence. The best PR professionals will: Read more
It's good to talk. The more people can reach out and find the right people and organisations to relate to, to discuss the issues important to them, to learn, to hang out and have fun, to contribute content and opinion and ideas, then the more satisfying they will find being part of society. I’m no sociologist, but it sounds like a good heuristic to me.
I stand by the assertion in my ebook on Social Web Analytics: “Ultimately, the Social Web has revolutionised communications massively and irrevocably, to the benefit of the consumer, the adaptive and agile organisation, and those who cherish an open society.”
Organisations’ engagement with the Social Web is still sufficiently nascent that it offers earlier adopters competitive advantage. And in the longer term however, it will be a condition of staying in the race.
Three amazing things
I’m posting today because three pretty amazing things have happened recently to catalyse this future; to extend the highly networked and Twitter-fuelled connectivity enjoyed by the minority today to the general population. I discuss these below, but first let me put this into context for those of you who not only have a FriendFeed, you’ve already fed it your BackType profile.
You’re not normal. Read more
The social Web analytics (SWA) field is buzzing, and I'm being contacted by companies in the sector that I didn't know about when I published The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008 on the 1st July. They're keen to make the 2009 update, and at this rate that will have to come earlier than later next year. The 2008 eBook has already been downloaded over five thousands of times, which I'm sure is more reflective of the heat in the market than the quality of my prose!
I define SWA as the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation's sentiment and influence. Here's a quick look at some of the vendors reaching out to me, then rounding off with a bit of gratuitous data visualisation of the blogosphere (you know how I get my kicks).
Techrigy describes itself as enabling "organizations to know what's being said about their brands, products and people across the social media eco-system. Techrigy's SM2 solution enables organizations to monitor and analyze conversations, including sentiment, across blogs, social networks, wikis, online video and other user-generated content on the web. Ultimately, Techrigy helps organizations embrace social media, manage risk and identify market trends in real time." Read more
There's a revolution coming in public relations... visualisation.
[Courtesy Christopher Baker]
You hold an event to gather key stakeholders together, say a couple of dozen, and you want to maximise the positive networking such an event should catalyse. You're also aware of a few potential personality clashes. But how many one-to-one relationships are you actually trying to manage here?
It turns out, your relationship with each of them included, that there's 300 relationships in that room! Wow, and compared to the big 'World Wide Web', or the even bigger 'World' come to that, this is a relatively insignificant number of people.
Let's go a step further. Say that there's just five critical issues facing your industry, each of which has just three positions, say "for", "against" and "no position", then each stakeholder can have one of 243 combinations of points of view.
To complete this picture, imagine now communicating the dynamic of this group in a report back to your boss say. How do you represent 300 relationships and 243 combinations of positions? Moreover, how do you portray the network evolving year-to-year, month-to-month, hour-by-hour?
Welcome to the world of data visualisation. Read more
The more stuff there is, the more difficult it is to find the right stuff at the right time. Guess that's almost Google's raison d'etre, but have they got it right? Is there a better or alternative search approach for you and your colleagues, and what would this mean for your marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO)?
Google's highly secretive approach to working out what might be more relevant to your search query is called PageRank. Fundamentally, their innovation counts a link to a website as a vote for that website's content. And a link to your site from a higher PageRanked site is worth more than a link from a lowly site.
This approach blew the competition away (remember Alta Vista?), and Microsoft and Yahoo! have been playing catchup since.
But when was the last time you hyperlinked to a website? Read more
Social Web Analytics (SWA) is the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation's sentiment and influence.
The advent of SWA is a pivotal moment in the development of the marketing communications industry.
It's just over ten weeks since I posted about my intention to write an ebook on social Web analytics, and now it's done. The ebook is hosted at www.socialwebanalytics.com, or you can simply click here to download it.
I do hope the ebook stimulates discussion and debate about this vital and nascent field, and look forward to the ongoing "distributed conversation". Love to know what you think.
Thanks to Larry Weber, David Meerman Scott, Brian Solis and the Social Web Analytics vendors for their support and contributions.
Twingly launches today, "the next generation blog search engine". I posted about joining the private beta a couple of months ago, and now everyone is welcome. Check it out. I quite like it. www.twingly.com. Read more
The B2B Social Web has arrived and it's not going to go away.
I was interviewed recently about the Social Web for a series of articles for Ecommerce Times, and here's the first half of our conversation...
1) What is THE most significant issue regarding the appearance of Web phenomena like social professional networks?
If being an expert or leader in your market is defined as others' regard for your insight, skills or services, then you must participate in the networks where this expertise is being shared, and where the people you want to influence are going to help shape their viewpoint. For many professions, these networks remain predominantly offline, but this balance will tip in favour of online for most if not all professions eventually.
MarCom Professional is a great example in my industry, and other social professional networks include sermo.com for physicians and inmobile for the wireless industry.
2) What major trends should my readers know about?
The all-singing, all-dancing social network (Friendster, Myspace, Bebo, Facebook) will increasingly represent the minority of our online social networking. We will gravitate towards specialised networks dedicated to our specific sports interest, hobby, profession, health condition etc. Read more
Hi,
Readers of my blog may know I'm speaking on one of the panels at the Being Digital conference, London, 10th June 2008. Well you might then like to know that you can win a free ticket to this event via Taptu... see their blog post here.